Dean Koontz - (1994)

by Winter Moon(Lit)

  o Climbing the sloped backyard, Toby pictured himself in a green boat on a cold black sea. Green because it was his favorite color. No land anywhere in sight. Just his little green boat and him in it. The sea was old, ancient, older than ancient, so old that it had come alive in a way, could think, could want things and need to have its way. The sea wanted to rise on all sides of the little green boat, swamp it, drag it down a thousand fathoms into the inky water, and Toby with it, ten thou WINTER MOON 463 sand fathoms, twenty thousand, down and down to a place with no light but strange music. In his boat, Toby had bags of Calming Dust, which he'd gotten from someone important, maybe from Indiana Jones, maybe from E.T maybe from Aladdin--probably from Aladdin, who got it from the Genie. He kept scattering the Calming Dust on the sea as his little green boat puttered along, and though the dust seemed light and silvery in his hands, lighter than feathers, it became hugely heavy when it hit the water, but heavy in a funny way, in a way that didn't make it sink, magical Calming Dust that crushed the water flat, made the sea as smooth and ripple-free as a mirror. The ancient sea wanted to rise up, swamp the boat, but the Calming Dust weighed it down, more than iron, more than lead, weighed it down and kept it calm, defeated it. Deep in the darkest and coldest canyons below its surface, the sea raged, furious with Toby, wanting more than ever to kill him, drown him, bash his body to pieces against shoreline rocks, wear him away with its waters until he would be just sand. But it couldn't rise, couldn't rise, all was calm on the surface, peaceful and calm, calm. Perhaps because Toby was concentrating so intensely on keeping the Giver under him, he lacked the strength to climb the entire hill, though the snow was not piled dauntingly high on that windswept ground. Jack put down the fuel cans two-thirds of the way to the higher woods, carried Toby to the stone house, gave Heather the keys, and returned for the ten gallons of gasoline. By the time Jack reached the fieldstone house again, :.464 DEAN KOONTZ Heather had opened the door. The rooms inside were dark. He hadn't had time to discover the reason for the malfunctioning lights. Nevertheless, now he knew why Paul Youngblood couldn't get power to the house on Monday. The dweller within hadn't wanted them to enter. The rooms were still dark because the windows were boarded over, and there was no time to pry off the plywood that shielded the glass. Fortunately, Heather had remembered the lack of power and come prepared. From two pockets of her ski suit, she produced, instead of bullets, a pair of flashlights. It always seems to come down to this, Jack thought: going into a dark place. Basements, alleyways, abandoned houses, boiler rooms, crumbling warehouses. Even when a cop was chasing a perp on a bright day and the chase led only outdoors, in the final confrontation, when you came face-to-face with evil, it was always a dark place, as if the sun could not find that one small patch of ground where you and your potential murderer tested fate. Toby walked into the house ahead of them, either unafraid of the gloom or eager to do the deed. Heather and Jack each took a flashlight and a can of gasoline, leaving two cans just outside the front door. Harlan Moffit brought up the rear with two cans. "What're these buggers like? They all hairless and bigeyed like those geeks who kidnapped Whitley Strieber?" In the unfurnished and unlighted living room, Toby was standing in front of a dark figure, and when their flashlight beams found what the boy had found before WINTER MOON 465 them, Harlan Moffit had his answer. Not hairless and big-eyed. Not the cute little guys from a Spielberg movie. A decomposing body stood with legs spread, swaying but in no danger of crumpling to the floor. A singularly repulsive creature was draped across the cadaver's back, bound to it by several greasy tentacles, intruded into its rotting body, as though it had been trying to become one with the dead flesh. It was quiescent but obviously alive: queer pulses were visible beneath its wet-silk skin, and the tips of some appendages quivered. The dead man with which the alien had combined was Jack's old friend and partner Tommy Fernandez. Heather realized, too late, that Jack had never actually seen one of the walking dead with its puppetmaster in full saddle. That sight alone was sufficient to undermine a lot of his assumptions about the inherently benign-or at least neutral--character of the universe and the inevitability of justice. There was nothing benign or just about what had been done with Tommy Fernandez's remains--or about what the Giver would do to her, Jack, Toby, and the rest of humanity while they were still alive, if it had the opportunity. The revelation had more sting because these were Tommy's remains in this condition of profound violation, rather than those of a stranger. She turned her flashlight away from Tommy and was relieved when Jack lowered his own quickly, as well. It would not have been like him to dwell on such a horror. She liked to believe that, in spite of anything he might.466 DEAN KOONTZ have to endure, he would always hold fast to the optimism and love of life that made him special. "This thing has gotta die," Harlan said coldly. He had lost his natural ebullience. He was no longer Richard Dreyfuss excitedly chasing his close encounter of the third kind. The most ominous apocryphal fantasies of evil aliens that the cheap tabloids and science fiction movies had to offer were not merely proved foolish by the grotesquerie that stood in the caretaker's house, they were proved naive as well, because their portrayals of extraterrestrial malevolence were shabby fun-house spookery compared to the endlessly imaginative abominations and tortures that a dark, cold universe held in store. "Gotta die right now." Toby walked away from Tommy Fernandez's body, into the shadows. Heather followed him with her flashlight beam. "Honey?" "No time," he said. "Where are you going?" They followed him to the back of the lightless house, through the kitchen, into what might once have been a small laundry room but now was a vault of dust and cobwebs. The desiccated carcass of a rat lay in one corner, its slender tail curled in a question mark. Toby pointed to a blotchy yellow door that no doubt had once been white. "In the cellar," he said. "It's in the cellar." Before going down to whatever awaited them, they put Falstaff in the kitchen and closed the laundry-room door to keep him there. WINTER MOON 467 He didn't like that. As Jack opened the yellow door on perfect blackness, the frantic scratching of the dog's claws filled the room behind them. Following his dad down the swaybacked cellar stairs, Toby concentrated intensely on that little green boat in his mind, which was really well built, no leaks at all, unsinkable. Its decks were piled high with bags and bags of silvery Calming Dust, enough to keep the surface of the angry sea smooth and silent for a thousand years, no matter what it wanted, no matter how much it raged and stormed in its deepest canyons. He sailed on and on across the waveless ocean, scattering his magical powder, the sun above him, everything just the way he liked it, warm and safe. The ancient sea showed him its own pictures on its glossy black surface, images meant to scare him and make him forget to scatter the dust-- his mother being eaten alive by rats, his father's head split down the middle and nothing inside it but cockroaches, his own body pierced by the tentacles of a Giver that was riding on his back--but he looked away from them quickly, turned his face to the blue sky instead, and wouldn't let his fear make a coward of him. The cellar was one big room, with a broken-down furnace, a rusted water heater--and the real Giver from which the other, smaller Givers had detached. It filled the back half of the room, all the way to the ceiling, bigger than a couple of elephants. It scared him. That was okay..468 DEAN KOONTZ But don't run. Don't run. It was a lot like the smaller versions, tentacles everywhere, but with a hundred or more puckered mouths, no lips, just slits, and all of them working slowly in its current calm state. He knew what it was saying to him with those mouths. It wanted him. It wanted to rip him open, take out his guts, stuff itself into him. Toby started shaking, he tried very hard to make himself stop but couldn't. Little green boat. Plenty of Calming Dust. Putter along and scatter, putter along and scatter. As the beams of the flashlights moved over it, he could see gullets the color of raw beef beyond those mouths. Clusters of red glands oozed clear syrupy stuff. Here and there the thing had spines as sharp as any on a cactus. There wasn't a top or bottom or front or back or head to it, just everything at once, everywhere at once, all mixed u
p. All over it, the working mouths were trying to tell him it wanted to push tentacles in his ears, mix him up too, stir his brains, become him, use him, because that's all he was, a thing to be used, that's all anything was, just meat, just meat to be used. Little green boat. Plenty of Calming Dust. Putter along and scatter, putter along and scatter. o In the deep lair of the beast, with its monstrous hulk looming over him, Jack splashed gasoline across the paralyzed python-like appendages, across other more repulsive and baroque features, which he dared not stare at if he ever hoped to sleep again. WINTER MOON 469 He trembled to think that the only thing caging the demon was a small boy and his vivid imagination. Maybe, when all was said and done, the imagination was the most powerful of all weapons. It was the imagination of the human race that had allowed it to dream of a life beyond cold caves and of a possible future in the stars. He looked at Toby. So wan in the backsplash of the flashlight beams. As if his small face had been carved of pure white marble. He must be in emotional turmoil, half scared to death, yet he remained outwardly calm, detached. His placid expression and marble-white skin was reminiscent of the beatific countenances on the sacred figures portrayed in cathedral statuary, and he was, indeed, their only possible salvation. A sudden flurry of activity from the Giver. A ripple of movement through the tentacles. Heather gasped, and Harlan Moffit dropped his half emptied can of gasoline. Another ripple, stronger than the first. The hideous mouths opened wide as if to shriek. A thick, wet, repugnant shijting. Jack turned to Toby. Terror disturbed the boy's placid expression, like the shadow of a warplane passing over a summer meadow. But it flickered and was gone. His features relaxed. The Giver grew still once more. "Hurry," Heather said.